Visible Kitteh Project Keeps Mice Out Of The House

April 21, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

[Aaron] and his wife have a wonderful cat that likes to contribute to the household by bringing field mice, shrews, and voles into the house as a ‘present.’ Obviously, this leads blood, fur, and viscera staining the carpet, and chasing around mortally wounded rodents isn’t [Aaron]’s idea of fun. To stop the cat from bringing small mammals into the house, [Aaron] is now preventing the cat from entering the house when it has an animal in its mouth.

[Aaron]’s project is inspired by this facial recognition cat door that refuses entry of all cats holding a small rodent in their mouth. To get his system working, [Aaron] started researching object recognition and built an Android app using the OpenCV libraries. To detect if his cat has a rodent in his mouth, [Aaron] is using Harr cascades – a proven object detection system that will detect and differentiate between a cat and a cat plus mouse.

Right now, the project is only about half done. [Aaron] is currently training his object recognition system, a process that can take days. Still, anything that keeps mouse guts out of the carpet is an awesome project in our books.

Android App Review: ADSdroid Gives You Every Datasheet, Ever

April 18, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 34 Comments

A few months ago when I reviewed the Android electronic reference app ElectroDroid, I made the offhand remark that a front end app for alldatasheet.com would be a killer mobile electronic reference app. [András Veres-Szentkirályi] accepted my challenge and built ADSdroid, the unofficial Android app for alldatasheet.com. You can check out my complete review after the break.

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Full Linux Distro On A Nook Color

April 17, 2012 by Mike Szczys 20 Comments

We should have included a footnote in the title. You can say that [Thomas Polasek] installed a full version of Arch Linux on his Nook Color, but there’s one caveat. It’s running on top of the Android kernel and his proof-of-concept uses a second computer to get it up and running. But there’s potential for that to change moving forward.

Unlike previous attempts to run a Linux distro on Android, this does away with using a VNC to show the desktop. [Thomas] is commandeering Android’s frame buffer so that it can be used by the X desktop without needing to set up display drivers. To start off he installed a ROM based on CM7. A couple of Android apps give him the functionality needed to get the Arch Linux distro running from the SD card. This is accomplished by tunneling into the tablet via SSH, and using the ‘chroot’ command to make it active. The hope is that this can somehow be automated by a script.

A female to female USB coupler was used to connect the keyboard and mouse to the Nook. It looks like LXDE would be useless without them; touch control is not yet implemented. Those shortcomings aside, everything seems to be running pretty fast in the video after the break.

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A Simple Project To Get You Started With The Android ADK

April 6, 2012 by Mike Nathan 9 Comments

simple-adk-exercise

If you just got your hands on a shiny new Android phone and are looking for a fun project to try out, you might want to check out this simple Arduino exercise that [Mike Mitchel] put together. Everyone needs a starting off point for hacking, and [Mike] thought that combining and Arduino and Android handset together for the purpose of temperature sensing and light metering would be a great place to begin.

The prerequisites for this project are a bit beyond a simple breadboard and a few ICs, requiring an $80 Android ADK board to go along with your phone and Arduino. If your focus is going to be on interfacing your phone with microcontrollers however, it’s purchase you’ll make sooner than later anyhow.

The setup is pretty simple as you might expect. A photocell and TMP36 temperature sensor are connected to the Arduino, then with a bit of code and USB host magic, the Android app shows the temp and amount ambient light present in the room.

[Mike] has made all of his easy to read and well commented code available online, so be sure to check it out if you have been thinking about (but putting off) playing around with the Android ADK.

Android On Your Netbook

March 28, 2012 by Mike Szczys 40 Comments

Looks like there’s a pretty easy way to install Ice Cream Sandwich, the newest version of Android, on your Netbook. Actually this is limited to a few types of hardware including netbooks like the eeePC. That’s because the ISO files used during installation have been tailored to the hardware used on those devices. As with other Linux distros, the ISO file can be loaded on a thumb drive using Unetbootin. From there you can give it a whirl as a Live CD (or USB as it were) or choose to install it on your hard drive. We haven’t given it a spin as the eeePC version doesn’t want to boot on our Dell Mini 9, but we don’t see a reason why this couldn’t be set up as a dual boot option.

Now why would you want to run Android on your netbook? We’ve already seen that there’s a way to run Android apps in Ubuntu. We bet some people just love Android, and others just hate the Unity desktop that Ubuntu now uses… especially when the Netbook Remix had a lot of good things going for it.

Adding Speech Control To An Old Robotic Arm

March 23, 2012 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

[Joris Laurenssen] has been hanging onto this robotic arm for about twenty years. His most recent project uses some familiar tools to add voice control for each of the arm’s joints.

The arm has its own controller which connects via a DB-25 port. [Joris’] first task was to figure out what type of commands are being sent through the connection. He did some testing to establish the levels of the signals, then hooked up his Arduino and had it read out the values coming through the standard parallel connection. This let him quickly establish the simple ASCII character syntax used to command movement from the device. There’s only eight command sets, and it didn’t take much work to whip up a sketch that can now drive the device.

The second portion of the project is to use voice commands to push these parallel signals to the arm. Instead of reinventing the wheel he decided to use the speech recognition feature of his Android phone. He used Scripting Layer for Android (SL4A) and a Python script to interpret commands, push them to his computer via Telnet, and finally drive the arm. We’ve embedded the video demo after the break. He gives the commands in Dutch but he overlaid comments in English so you can tell what’s going on.

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Android Rolled Into Linux Kernel 3.3

March 19, 2012 by Mike Szczys 21 Comments

The latest version of the Linux kernel was just released on Sunday, and there’s a little bonus which we think is worth considering. It seems that many changes from Android made their way into version 3.3 of the Linux kernel.

This may not sound like much, but it’s a great example of the power of open source. Since device specific changes based on the Linux kernel must be released under the same license, hardware manufactures are compelled to release their sources. But normally this would only help you if you have the expertise to slog through their code and find the parts that you need for whatever purpose you have in mind. But with these changes being rolled into the main kernel you should be able to run your own distributions on Android devices relatively easy; hardware support is already in there. Of course there’s still a lot of expertise that goes into cross-compiling an OS.

This may have the potential to open up old Android hardware as a development platform. Think of how Chumby hardware has been used in robotics projects. Now what if your old Bluetooth and WiFi enable cellphone had a stock kernel that was as easy and open to use in your own projects?

[Thanks Adam]